The fight for playing time stands test of time

If you’ve ever been involved in sports in any capacity — player, parent, coach, or administrator, one of the topics that can always be a point of contention as people look at it from different perspectives is the issue of playing time.

Do we play everyone equal or do some players deserve to play more?

At a pee-wee league football game in Philadelphia many years back, a 40-year-old father was arrested for pulling a gun on his son’s coach during the game.

Apparently upset at the amount of playing time that his son was getting from the coach, the father approached the coach to argue which kid should play and which kid shouldn’t play, a physical altercation ensued, and then the father pulled the gun. This on a Sunday morning pee-wee league — for 6- and 7-year-olds.

This father was a certifiable lunatic, but why was there even a question of how much someone was playing at a football game for 6- and 7-year-olds?

The question of playing time is an age-old question that anyone who has ever played, coached or parented a kid in sports has faced at one time or another.

If your kid is one of the “better” players on the team, it’s human nature to wonder why she is sitting on the bench and allowing that “other” player to take her precious playing time. If your child is one of the lesser talented kids on the team, you wonder if all the financial commitment, time commitment and long drives home are worth the minimum allotted playing time provided by her coach.

Every situation is different and fortunately there are many alternatives for our children to pursue should the situation they are in not be the best fit. There are different levels of competition in most sports from recreation to travel to club and then on to high school and college.

The higher up the ladder your child chooses to climb, the less evenly the playing time is distributed.

When my oldest went to Calvert Hall and we had our first parent meeting, it’s still burned in my brain that the young whippersnapper of a coach told us that there was no guarantee of playing time for each kid now that they were in high school. “We” had just endured two weeks of heart-wrenching tryouts and here this young dude was telling me our son may never get on the field.

It certainly was a wake-up call, but one that has prepared me for those same conversations with my players and sometimes with their parents.

In my higher-level club and high school varsity level programs, I may be guilty of playing my more talented players at the expense of the other players in an attempt to remain competitive in the game and our league standing. It first hit me when I watched a video of a game that one of my parents filmed for me about 10 years ago.

I kept looking for my own son and realized that I had even shorted him of significant time on the field.

But the purpose of the youngest age and less competitive levels is to encourage physical activity in a fun, learning environment and to hopefully have the child enjoy the overall benefits of the sport in which they choose to participate. When I’m coaching my youngest players, I first try to make sure they want to come back to the next practice. Then the next game.

Once they do that, we can work on coming back next year.

It still makes me sad to think about several of my friends’ kids who played for football programs that played the “best” 7- and 8-year-old players for a majority of the game and line the remaining players up single file, sending them in the game for one play at a time only to come out and go to the back of the line.

I’d be interested to see how many of those players continued on with football and how many of the “better” players that got all of the playing time fared in their youth, high school and college careers to determine if it was all worth it.

Kids all develop at different ages and those that are your “best” players at age 7 carry no guarantee that they will remain at the top when they hit adolescence.

Gold medalist Carl Lewis once said, “The best kids are going to become the best. But the best thing about it is that you're going to learn lessons in playing those sports about winning and losing and teamwork and teammates and arguments and everything else that are going to affect you positively for the rest of your life.”

Give the youngest kids the opportunity to learn through playing the game, not through watching it. You never know what diamond in the rough may show itself in the heat of battle.